As an architect who is very much working
with the computer, using the computer for designing and planning, I want
to present some points of view concerning recent developments and forthcoming
preferences for our activities. As I do not like military expressions,
I will not talk about strategies: I prefer to talk about algorithms, because
in strategies there is a linear one way subject/object relationship, wheras
algorithms provide involvement into relativity.

My center of interest is not a detached
singularity (the aura of an object, the charismatic demiurge), but a dynamic
interchange: architecture and urbanism are public, the planning, the method
is public - and everything is on the web. Therefore public & open spaces,
which are to be used simultaneously / collectively by several / many people,
are the (functional) plot for a merging/morphing/scaling architecture.
Since everything is changing rapidly nowadays, and since I contribute with
my work in a "quick & dirty" way, I am basically opposing all strategies
of sustainability.

When analysing up-to-date, advanced
architecture and urbanism, we can see a paradigmatic shift taking place,
which is the shift from object to process: instead of planning long-lasting
buildings and rigid buildings, we are focussing on evolutionary developments
and, therefore, we are changing our planning methods.

In former times, there have been other
architectural rules, for instance: form, function, construction (since
2000 years!); later on, it was another rule: form follows function. But
the rule above all rules still is that a building should fit the architects´
(clients´) taste. Due to this rule, architecture is reduced to anthropocentric
and expressionistic settings, and due to this rule you see mainly lousy
buildings, bad architecture if you take a look arround. Therefore I have
been pleading for a long time for a change of rules. As fractal geometry
explains, it is just the algorithm which provides the outcome (it is not
the desire, the content-related thinking etc.). Just think of the CIAM
programme of urbanism and compare it with what Peter Weibel has just explained
about the development from the functional city to the informational city.

Nowadays we don't talk so much any more
about the rules of architecture, we talk more about methods of architecture,
about design methods. For instance: traditional architecture has been working
(and still is) with images/pictures - facades and masterplans; in this
field proportions, materials, colors, aestetics, "how buildings look like"
are important; and it is in this sense that the Etoile was implanted into
Paris. But recent developments tell us that we cannot continue in this
way; by means of "pictures of architecture" - be it a nice looking facade
or a rigid urbanistic grid - we can not solve the architectural and urbanistic
problems of Mexico City, Kairo, Peking ....

The planning methods nowadays in architecture
are quite different from the measures which have been applied in the 19th
century, or even those which have been applied in the middle of this century.
And we are lucky that they are available because the problems are quite
different.

Advanced planning methods have changed
radically since we have been using the computer, which started in the 80ies,
on the basis of cybernetic architecture of the 70ies. When I am talking
about using the computer for architectural production, I don't talk about
the use of the computer to imitate what has happened before in planning
or about how architects used to design by hand, by brain or by belly. And
I don´t talk about the computer as drafting instrument, or as a tool
for image rendering. Now we are talking about the mode in which the computer
is working, with it´s artificial intelligence, based on the new system
theories like fractal geometry, chaos theory, fuzzy logic and so on. That
is quite different from the others, from the ancient methods of architecture
which have been more or less analogue methods, and probably these new methods
are better to cope with the current situation.

The central part of the computer is
the CPU, the central processing unit, and this indicates that the computer
is working as a processor: it is processing and controlling processes and,
therefore, I think that to use the computer for processing, as the word
CPU indicates, is the right use of the computer and not to make images,
because rendered images belong and refer to the former analogue world of
picture-making, when architecture still was a matter of making deterministic,
rigid pictures, whereas nowadays in the days of processing, we are dealing
with computer-processed architecture which is not any more the world of
pictures. And the problems of the urbanistic agglomerations are not (and
never have been) on the visual/image level, but on the level of controlled
/ uncontrolled processes.

In this sense, the computer as a paradigm
provides us with a new toolbox, and the most important design methods are
to control processes, to simulate processes and to stimulate processes.
The most important programmes when using the computer nowadays are not
drawing or rendering programmes. The most important programmes for production
of architecture are certainly evolutionary models, growth models, game
of life systems, cellular automata, swarm models, digitally generated architecture
etc. There are many different approaches in that direction: think about
"liquid architecture", "trans architecture", "algorithmic architecture",
about John Frazer, Andi Gruber, Chris Langton, Marcos Novak, Lars Spuybroek,
Andy Wünsche.....

We are dealing with quite a new toolbox
of architecture - the binary/digital/algorithmic toolbox - instead of the
traditional analogue toolbox. The major shift is: the anthropomorphic/expressionistic
setting becomes replaced by external/algorithmic procedures, historic and
value-dependent attitudes are replaced by "quick & dirty"!

With this new toolbox, we are clearly
in a new world which is beyond the determinism of architecture and beyond
preconceived aims in architecture. This is another paradigmatic shift,
because, up to now, architecture was to design something today which will
be built tomorrow and which as a building and a message should last for
ever; an everlasting building was the aim. This was the old deterministic
scheme of architecture and it was anthropomorphic because it has been developed
out of the brain, the belly or the hand of the architects.

As you well know, the pyramids, for
instance, the Colosseum in Rome, and similar buildings, are famous because
they survived for a long time. Evidently there is an equation: an architect
who wants to become a famous architect must build a famous building, and
a famous building had the obligation to be a long-lasting building. And
you can ask any tourist; he will approve of this equation. We all like
old whiskies, Rembrandt drawings, traditional habits, therefore, we all
like old buildings and we preserve or even reconstruct old buildings. In
other words, the quality of a building is a function of duration. I think
these elements come out of a conservative world which has nothing to do
with the contemporary evolutionary point of view.

To determine has been the basic idea
of architectural planning up to now, although determinism has been overcome
in philosphy, art and science since a long time. If I should make a manifest
for the architecture of the 21st century I would outline that architecture
will become non-deterministic, by changing from designing objects to designing
procedures.

In the up-to-date toolbox, as I explained
before, the toolbox with which we are starting into a new millennium, we
have digital evolutionary algorithmic elements, and so on. But I can't
find in this toolbox any programme which is called sustainability. And,
therefore, I suppose that sustainability is a traditional tool which is
designed to prolong elements which should rather be deleted.

Fictitious
detail of an infinitely big number (Plottegg already 1988):demonstrating
that there is probably no such thing as sustainability

I think sustainability is a conservative
tool which does not create new ideas. It is a tool which wants to keep
things running as they are. For instance, everybody is afraid that the
globe becomes overheated. Therefore sustainability is a very good topic
for a symposium and an ideal instrument to raise money from Brussels.

Architecture and urbanism should be
less afraid and should be less concerned with sustaining bad systems, bad
existing economic systems, and bad political systems. Architecture and
urbanism had better focus on evolutionary models and in other directions
where new ideas can be developed. Instead of images and objects, we should
design processes and entertainment. This should prove to be rather simple,
because today we do know how networking, evolutionary and autocatalytic
models are structured instead of rigid centralistic models, and we do know
how to change from content-related design with aims and desires to the
design of systems.

The method of forward-planning never
looks back, it accelerates architecture. As architecture is a slow medium,
which did not accept the major scientific changes in the 20th century (from
expressionism to algorithms, from determinism to relativism, from constructivism
to deconstructivism ....... see exhibition "Beyond Art" curated by P.Weibel,
Antwerpen 1998) it is even more urgent that new browsing systems become
part of our planning methods. To accelerate architecture, design must be
dynamised, the design process simulates/stimulates real-life procedures.

The forward planning method is not (as
usual) linear from the first sketch to the "finished project", from one
scale to the next bigger scale - where the finished project differs from
the beginning only in terms of details. The forward planning process is
modifying permanently - not in the sense of correcting errors or of improvement
of the world, but on behalf of pemanent changes of surrounding variables,
growth or changing of functions.

As seen from the point of view of the
theory of architecture, the rigid images (object, proportion, aestetics)
of traditional architecture become abandoned and shifted towards the control,
steering of (urban, architectonic, building) processes. Building science
is not understood as object-related (function, structure, typology) any
more, but as a mode of procedure, as (planning) method. The function of
"the function in architecture" is not the object / form any more, but rather
the process. An object as building is not the aim, may be the result. Buildings
are changing (ref. Steward Brand: "how buildings learn") and the history
of architecture confirms this: after the traditional building-body-architecture
(volume, mass) and subsequently the structural architecture, we are nowadays
designing information-architecture. Built architecture becomes the flesh
for the wireframe-model of reality. The theory of mapping / merging / morphing
different electronic, physical and social spaces together as the new "site"
of architecture is the basis for the concept of virtual&real-life space.
Thus - after the rigid, deterministic design of definite conditions, and
after the concepts for the design of developments - the transition to an
architecture of process-design is formulated and thus the transition towards
architecture-algorithms, towards autocatalytic and genetic architecture
takes place.

In a world of self-emerging systems,
there are no such things as man-made strategy or sustainability, which
are abstruse and oldfashioned items.